Rise of the White Queen
by Right What Is Wrong
Summary: Laying low after her defeat by Phoenix, the White Queen of the Hellfire Club travels abroad with her bodyguard and discovers that her dear bodyguard apparently has a "destiny". So the local super-powered idiots insist, anyway. Hah. She'll show them a "power the Dark Lord knows not"... (Whitetigerwolf's White Knight Challenge: FemHarry/Emma Frost. Femmeslash. WBWL. Oneshot.)


**Author's Note** : _Inspired_ by Whitetigerwolf's White Knight Challenge, but has a focus probably askew from what was intended.

Please note in advance that Emma uses her original characterization from the Dark Phoenix Saga, and as such is... what some readers might say the Wizarding world deserves, really.

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For the first time in her life, Emma Frost, White Queen of the Hellfire Club, had been defeated in telepathic combat. Catastrophically so. When her bodyguard and lover had dug her out of the rubble under which she had been buried – yes, _telepathic_ combat had caused a _physical_ collapse, if that was any indication of her opponent's sheer power – she had been catatonic, and revived only through the combination of psychic pleading and generous administration of stimulants.

Thereafter, she had considered it best to lie low on another continent. Corrupting Jean Grey into the unfilled role of Black Queen had seemed rewarding when she'd regarded the woman only as another powerful telepath. Having actually dueled Grey, and finding her to be not so much a telepathic prodigy as an eldritch abomination wearing human flesh, she had decided to abandon the rest of the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle to their fate. If anything remained once Grey was done with it, perhaps she could return and assert dominance over the ashes.

Unfortunately, her cover had soon been disrupted – not when _she_ was recognized, but when a passing miscreant had recognized her bodyguard and his thoughts had immediately shifted to malign intent. They'd baited him into following them to an isolated place, then repaid his intentions in kind. The man's psychic shields had proved inadequate to Emma's assault, and she'd learned many, many interesting things.

For instance, that a secret society of super-mutants – they preferred to call themselves "witches" and "wizards" – existed all over the world, concealing their existence through exhaustive mental tampering; that, in Britain, their numbers were ravaged by persistent civil war; that a prophecy had been made, predicting that the war would be ended by the death of either the self-proclaimed Dark Lord or a child meeting certain criteria; finally, that they had run through the other two candidates for the child, and were left with the last one, a baseline-human who had been born to super-mutant parents, been disowned in infancy accordingly, and run away at the age of ten while her relatives were on a trip abroad.

Unfortunately for them, Amaryllis Potter was not available for these idiots to blindly throw into their meat grinder of prophecy, having been attached to one Emma Frost from the moment they met on the streets. Even more unfortunately for them, Emma gleaned that their population was overall weak-willed, feckless, and easily-led.

Their sole good fortune was that the name of Lord Voldemort was familiar to Emma as an irritating entity that caused dear Amaryllis repeated migraines, and failed to desist even after repeated telepathic beatings through the unnatural link that bound him to her. As such, she would quite happily see him dead – agonizingly so, if at all possible.

Getting in the good graces of "Wizarding" Britain was fairly easy. Wizards held mutants in utter contempt, seeing them as magical idiot-savants who posed a severe threat to the secrecy of magic overall, but they were cheered by the news that their last possible savior was not a baseline-human after all. Emma herself was passed off as an extremely weak telepath, capable of doing little more than reading minds. She let them pretend their pathetic little shields were at all adequate to keep her out. They thought more interesting things that way.

And they were _so_ easy to dominate when she wished it. Their local idea of mind-control was as hilarious as it was pathetic. The so-called "Imperius" induced a floaty, peaceful feeling absent of responsibility, in which the target happily complied with any and all orders given to them… also known by sadomasochists as "subspace". That the Wizarding world was _so_ susceptible to it that they ranked a spell obviously intended for perverted games up with those specialized for torture and murder… Well, given their slavish eagerness to follow any strong personality, she wasn't even surprised.

"Strong", of course, didn't mean "sane". The leader of the less-bloodthirsty side was a grandfatherly incompetent who had driven the war effort into the ground through grandiose plans, dubious follow-through, and obsessive secrecy. He was still preferable to his opponent, a deranged imbecile who had decided to shred his _own_ psyche. From a telepathic perspective, this was indescribably moronic – an apparent side-effect of immortality didn't _matter_ when he had irreparably destroyed the integrity of his _own_ mind, leaving him a sitting duck for any powerful telepath!

And Emma proceeded to prove just that by entering his mind through the unnatural link with which he had caused poor Amaryllis so many headaches, pummeling him mercilessly, and taking advantage of his defensive crouch to follow the _other_ links in his mind to the other pieces of his shattered psyche. On her way out, she had assaulted him again for good measure. The effort had left her with a pounding headache of her own, but it had been utterly worth it.

He'd somehow attached the pieces of his mind to a diary (which he had reabsorbed), a ring (which the grandfatherly moron had destroyed, albeit at the cost of his arm), a locket, a cup, a diadem, and his pet snake. Oh, and her lover. Later experimentation would prove that the container could be left unharmed if the mind-shard was… extensively dissected. In other words, had it had its own body, it would have been left a drooling, vacant shell, utterly incapable of thought – or, indeed, experiencing anything except pain.

Apparently that counted as destroying its soul. Hm. She might be more disturbed by that if the British Wizarding world didn't use destruction of souls as a regular punishment for enemies of the state, and consider telepathic assault to the point of insanity to be its primary sentence for criminals. When her level of amorality was the governmental standard, destroying someone even _more_ depraved was probably the closest she'd come to public service.

First, however, she'd tracked down the pieces. The locket was kept in the house of a friend of Amaryllis's birth-family – its guardian, a gremlin-like house-slave, had gratefully handed it over when she'd explained that she planned to destroy it. In return, she'd… loosened… the bindings preventing it from harming its hated master. The boor had hit on her a few too many times. He could repent of his characterization of her as "just playing hard to get" at leisure.

The diadem was located in some sort of pocket-dimension piled high with junk, one somehow related to the local academy. Rifling through the minds of her supposed allies, she would find its match within the memories of one fellow, a former delinquent who had been driven to sobriety by the loss of his twin: the "Room of Hidden Things", which could be accessed from _this_ corridor on _that_ floor like _so_. A visit to the school paid off, and the supposedly-hidden diadem proved rather easy to find for a telepath. A mind remained a mind, even torn to pieces and stuffed into gaudy trinkets, and she could sense it all the same.

That proved valuable when pursuing the cup. _That_ was hidden within a goblin fortress which, in this age of decadent capitalist modernity, now was passed off as a bank. Yes, wizards made a policy of storing their wealth and valuables with a resentful subject population that venerated violence, treachery, and revenge – it made one wonder if the price for their advanced mutation was severe cognitive wasting. Currently it was a resentful subject population controlled by a faction that had defected to the Dark Lord, and so, for those not following the great idiot, it had resumed its original function as a fortress.

However, the stupidity was apparently contagious, as the goblins themselves chose to have their vaults guarded by dragons. Tortured, broken dragons, but dragons nonetheless. Dragons who, if they could only free themselves from their restraints, would be _delighted_ to avenge themselves upon the two-legged demons who had tormented them for uncounted years.

Communicating with sub-sentient organisms was always difficult, but she had eventually explained to the hapless beasts that they could crane their lengthy necks around, aim at their restraints, and breathe fire. The results had been as predictable as they were satisfying, and, in the chaotic aftermath of Gringotts's recapture, it had been a trivial task to take a stroll down to the tunnels and _liberate_ the cup from the smoking, ruined vault. It was just such a pity no one would ever quite fathom what had made all those dragons _do_ that, though. Perhaps it had been some mad scheme by the Dark Lord gone _ever_ so terribly wrong?

The snake, unfortunately, was always at the self-professed Dark Lord's side – which defeated the point of tearing off a piece of one's own mind to hide it somewhere safe, she would think, but perhaps that realization took intelligence which he no longer possessed. Never had she _actually_ met a megalomaniac who could benefit from the more insulting passages on the Evil Overlord List, but Lord Voldemort evidently did need the sage advice of a five-year-old child. Then again, he seemed to have done his best to turn himself into a snake, so he was already a lost cause.

At that point, she set about experimentation on the mind-shards which she had at hand, and was pleased to discover that, contrary to prior reports, only dissolution of the mind-shards was really _needed_. Then again, she supposed none of the prior destroyers of "Horcruxes" (which sounded like a particularly exotic entertainment at the Hellfire Club) had been telepaths both competent enough and unethical enough to cheerfully destroy "souls"… or involved with Wizarding law enforcement, come to think of it. Really, why _did_ anyone think these things retained use in cases of extreme emergency, when the government could freely authorize deployment of soul-eating entities? The cognitive decline from ripping apart one's own mind surely wasn't _retroactive_ , was it?

With the idiot's vaunted immortality hanging on by a slender thread, all that was left was resolving the actual war. That might have been somewhat difficult, since the grandfatherly moron had managed to get his own side ravaged, the weak-willed wizards had largely decided the wind was blowing in the Dark Lord's favor, and the split-souled wretch had actually managed to confer telepathic shielding upon his inner circle of troops. Dear, dear, dear. How _would_ she cope with that?

Amaryllis's mutant power was suited to melee combat and melee combat alone: she could encase herself in armor made out of light, which proved impervious to almost all assault. With practice, she had learned to create a shield and sword as well, but still couldn't maintain any construct not within a foot or so of her body. Fortunately, a bit of testing discovered that her armor reflected _spells_ as well, and wizards were so _grievously_ dependent on their spells for offense… and defense…

Several one-sided massacres later, the Dark Lord himself was finally drawn out of his lair. A pitched battle commenced… one that proved somewhat less one-sided, as even Amaryllis was sent running by his "Fiendfyre", a unique and vicious spell that functioned by feeding off the energy of all it touched. Fortunately, the concentration it required left his mind even more vulnerable, and Emma leapt in through the backdoor of Amaryllis's mind-shard and activated the final phase of her plan for the war.

He had conferred psychic shielding through the "Dark Mark", an ingenious piece of work that granted him a rudimentary telepathic bond with all so marked: he could convey pain to its bearers, call them to him, or find them wherever they fled. And many of those so Marked were important, rich people with an immense amount of political influence, an interesting collection of contraband, and an incredible talent for weaseling out from under the due penalties for their numerous crimes.

So, of course, she took it.

Oh, it wasn't _easy_ – he screamed and fought, and doubly so once he realized what she was doing. But he couldn't defend himself while controlling the Fiendfyre well enough to prevent it from turning back upon its caster, and, by the time he was desperate enough to cancel the spell, she'd already seized control of the telepathic network. A moment later, all of his servants on the battlefield collapsed in agony, and he himself could not both hold off the telepathic assault and defend himself from the returning knight in shining armor with a wickedly sharp blade and a _ferocious_ headache.

Once he was incapacitated, Emma shortly pulverized the shard inside the scar and inflicted the same fate upon that within the severely-wounded snake. Amaryllis performed the _coup de grace_ upon the mutilated, helpless fool who had deemed himself a Dark Lord, then sat down, released her armor, and all but passed out from exhaustion.

That was very nearly the end of it, except that the grandfatherly old fool had approached the moment Amaryllis let her guard down, convinced that the Horcrux could only be destroyed by her death; he had not quite bought that mind-shards could be destroyed without destroying their containers, and, apparently, decided that the _seemingly_ destroyed shards had instead migrated to join the one in Amaryllis's scar. Idiotic old man.

So she jumped him. He put up a reasonable fight, for what must have been a minute or two of real time – and then his mindscape exploded, and Emma found herself abruptly back in her own body and the old man crumpled on the ground, unmoving. He would linger for a few more hours, never regaining consciousness, before he at last expired.

She had been as shocked as any of those who ran screaming to his side – she hadn't even known telepathic attack could induce stroke, though it made sense, in retrospect, that the sheer stress might be too much for the elderly. Nor had she ever been deep inside anyone's mind when they died – or close enough to it; the experience disturbed her for some time after, and she could understand, to some slight extent, what might have driven the self-proclaimed Dark Lord to rip up his own mind in the hopes of escaping death.

Not entirely, however. She had a functioning brain.

It was ultimately for the best – the other major power player had been eliminated from Wizarding Britain, and, as far as anyone other than Amaryllis knew, her hands were clean. It was just such a tragedy that, on his way to congratulate the Chosen One, the stress of the battle and excitement of the Dark Lord's final demise had proven too much for the poor old man.

In the next year, she did more to reform the Ministry of Magic than generations of pure-hearted souls had managed before her – Of course she did, corruption and inefficiency were _utterly_ inadequate traits in servants. The servants disliked it, but it really was marvelous what one could accomplish when one didn't care about the welfare of those on the other end of a telepathic bond. After a particularly pig-headed one ended up being checked into the local sanitarium, the rest grew much more compliant.

He should really have counted himself lucky that she also instituted reform of the healthcare system. Sanitariums were a rather sore point for her. Guards found to take liberties with their charges thereafter found _themselves_ dumped in the middle of the English Channel. Without their wands, mind.

The penitentiary system also underwent reforms, though less for humanitarian reasons than to cease the _demented_ Wizarding custom of supplying malign, self-sustaining thought-forms with a continuous stream of sustenance, suppressing the sole spell that could defend against them, and failing to have any effective measure for _destroying_ the things. Her hypothesis of the magical mutation inherently inducing cognitive deficiencies seemed to gather more evidence by the day.

At Hogwarts, she installed a puppet headmaster and instituted reforms, such as the exorcism of a professorial ghost, enforcement of appropriate safety measures, and eradication of the local population of man-eating spiders. The cultivator of the colony of man-eating spiders was also expelled from the premises. Ideally she would also change the school sport to one that _didn't_ involve sending cannonballs towards children's heads, but the right of young people to deal themselves irreversible brain damage during key developmental periods for the sake of fleeting athletic glory was, alas, one upon which even a telepath could not infringe.

The British Wizarding policy of memory-wiping mutants who discovered their powers, or sending them to the sanitarium if their powers would not remain dormant, ceased. She suspected such a change had already taken place in America – hence the _sudden_ explosion in the mutant population, herself included. Mutants would instead be invited to a newly-opened extension of Hogwarts, which she planned to supervise more personally – provided she could get the time. Blackmailing, compelling, and scheming her way through an entire society was difficult.

On a happier note, funds that had formerly been diverted into aristocrats' pockets was now diverted into magical research. Lacking the prejudices common to Wizarding society, she was free to select the most talented, regardless of prior family connections. Magic had an enormous amount of potential – if only any of its users had the brains to see it. When their precious Statute of Secrecy finally fell (and it would not long survive advancing technological progress), England's wizards, at least, would be able to both defend themselves and justify their existences to the world… and mutants would reap the benefits along with them.

Nineteen months later, as she took a well-deserved break from her duties with her lover, she recalled that the crazy old man had professed that _love_ was the power the Dark Lord knew not. Utter bunk, of course. It had hardly even been Amaryllis's mutant power that had been the power he knew not; yes, it kept her alive through the fight, but it had really been the link to his mind that had been the major vulnerability, and that had nothing to do with _love_. No, what had felled the Dark Lord had been sheer telepathic power –

And hadn't she decided to bend that power toward ridding the world of the Dark Lord for the pettiest and most personal of reasons – that his continued existence gave Amaryllis migraines?

Emma sat up and stared at the wall for several seconds; then she was pulled back down to the bed, whereupon she resumed activities far more pleasurable than contemplating the details of the downfall of a long-dead lunatic.

Bah. What had that senile old man known, anyway?

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 **Author's Note** : _"In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen…"_

Telepaths are terrifying things.

The main difficulty I ran into when trying to seriously do the challenge was that an active telepath was _too_ overpowered, and either I nerfed the hell out of her with ubiquitous Occlumency or I couldn't keep an F!Harry with a melee-based power as a comparable character. Eventually I just gave in to the fic that wanted to be written. (Frankly, this brute-force-based version isn't exploiting telepathy _enough_. The correct implementation is to slowly poison everyone's mind via suggestion until they fall in lockstep with your designs, yet think it's their own idea… but that wouldn't fit in this oneshot.)

Also, I've been binge-reading multiple fics where a hyper-competent Harry crosses over to another universe and completely breaks the canon plot with judicious application of the Potterverse skillset. Consider this Marvel-canon's revenge. :)

(Clearing up two implied, but not explicitly established, points: since this is Wrong BWL, the prior two Chosen Ones were F!Harry's unnamed sibling and Neville Longbottom. Amaryllis would have been recognizable due to retaining canon!Harry's extreme resemblance to James (albeit here in an opposite-sex version), and possibly to her unnamed sibling.)


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